She led the Paris Club negotiations to reschedule her country’s debt and earned rave reviews as managing director of the World Bank in 2007-11. Hers is the CV of a formidable public economist.

Mr Ocampo was also finance minister, though his time in office, 1996-98, saw the budget deficit balloon. He ran the mildly statist UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. His is the CV of the international bureaucrat.

Mr Kim, the head of a university in New England, has done a lot of good things in his life, but the closest he has come to running a global body was as head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation—not a post requiring tough choices between, say, infrastructure, health and education. He pioneered trials of aid programmes before they became fashionable and set up an outfit called Partners in Health which does fine work in Haiti and Peru. But this is a charity, not a development bank. Had Mr Obama not nominated him, he would be on no one’s shortlist to lead the World Bank. (Indeed he is a far worse example of Western arrogance than Christine Lagarde, whom the Europeans shoehorned into the IMF job last year: the French finance minister plainly had the CV for the job.)

It is perhaps natural that the French should want change. The Gaullists, under Mr Sarkozy and his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, have held the presidency since 1995. Right across Europe in the euro-zone crisis, incumbents have been unseated by disgruntled voters. The French are fearful and restless and want something different. But the prospect of Mr Sarkozy’s defeat is still a remarkable one, in many ways. Unlike Mr Giscard d’Estaing, who had to run against Mr Chirac as well as facing Mitterrand, he has no centre-right rival. And he can reasonably claim to be the sort of authoritative leader to whom voters might turn in a crisis. Indeed, polls suggest the French rate Mr Sarkozy more highly than Mr Hollande for most traits to do with leadership. He scores better for having “the authority of a head of state” (54%, next to 23% for Mr Hollande), for being “capable of taking difficult decisions” (49 to 23%) and for being “capable of taking the right decisions faced with the current economic and financial crisis” (41 to 27%).

The French also recognise Mr Sarkozy’s energetic efforts during the euro crisis. He has pushed through unpopular reforms to universities and a rise in the retirement age. And he has a decent foreign-policy record, from taking France back into NATO’s military structure to his intervention in the 2008 Russian-Georgian war and his joint leadership of the campaign against Libya. Next to all this, Mr Hollande, a Socialist hack who led a fractious party for 11 years and has never had a ministerial job, is a debutant: his biggest crisis was a 2005 party split over the draft European Union constitution. With his friends from the Mitterrand era, there is little fresh about him.

(...)

The strain in the Sarkozy camp is beginning to show. A poll this week gave him only 24% in the first round, fully five points behind Mr Hollande. Not one poll has had Mr Sarkozy winning the second. On the far right, Marine Le Pen could well do better than polls suggest, and come in ahead of both the Communist-backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the centrist François Bayrou, whose efforts to talk seriously about France’s dire public finances have won him little support.

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(From The Economist print edition April 21st-27th 2012)

Excerpts from:

France’s presidential election

The anti-Sarkozy vote

All the signs point to a win for the Socialist François Hollande, chiefly because he is the anti-Sarkozy candidate

Apr 21st 2012 | DONZY | from the print edition

FAR from the giant rallies and big-screen showmanship of the final days of a presidential campaign, the sleepy town of Donzy in Burgundy feels untouched by politics. The talk in the bars is of the local fête and fishing. Only one campaign poster, for a fringe anti-capitalist, has been pasted to the municipal noticeboard. Yet this bellwether town is a pointer to how the French will vote in the election on April 22nd and May 6th: at every poll since 1981, it has gone for the winner.

In 1981 Donzy backed François Mitterrand, a Socialist. In 2007 it swung behind Nicolas Sarkozy, on the Gaullist right. This time the little town, encircled by wheat fields and home to factories making plastic straws and umbrellas, looks likely to back François Hollande, the Socialist. “My bet is that Donzy will vote Hollande,” says Jean-Paul Jacob, the (independent) centre-right mayor. This is not out of enthusiasm for the man, as “people find him cold, there’s no fervour about him.” Rather, the mayor thinks, it reflects disappointment with Mr Sarkozy. “His personality”, he says wryly, “doesn’t leave people indifferent.”

(...)